STEPS TO A POST-THERAPEUTIC FUTURE
In the late 1970’s, shortly before he would have been thrown out for raising unwelcome questions about patients’ rights, Eugene left his job as a mental health worker in a locked ward of a psychiatric hospital near New York City and promised himself never to work in such an inhumane setting ever again. For almost 20 years now, he has worked as the chief psychologist of a clinic for child and adolescent psychiatry in northern Germany that focuses on dialogue and networking in the work with clients and their families. Guided largely by social constructionist assumptions, he and his colleagues view psychiatric diagnoses as rather unaesthetic and unhelpful vocabularies of infirmity, psychopharmaceutical drugs and forced treatment as unnecessary excesses of a society that places little value upon relationship. Along with a strong interest in film and media, he finds himself frequently trying to imagine the contours of a post therapeutic future.
